The modern poetry collection is changing. The traditional gathering of three-dozen-or-so lyric poems, like pressed flowers in an album, is giving way to messier kinds of literary document, which are more like Facebook feeds in their interwoven stories of an online world.

Amaan Hyder’s first book, At Hajj, has a strong narrative spine in the form of imagined glimpses of the annual Islamic pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca. As Hyder has said, this existential sequence is focused on the paradox of isolation in a crowd and “the physicality of doing the Hajj”. Written in dream-like prose, it uses stripped-back sentences to follow tiny stories of cause-and-effect in a mass of bodies: “The message went down the line to hold on tight and he had the sweat…